Whatever familiar pop conventions just jumped into your head, forget ‘em. Hospitality will force you to lose them. The band filled its upcoming self-titled debut LP, due Jan. 31 from Merge Records, with catchy, jagged rock littered with surprising song structures and infectious solo sections. It all adds up to a record where every song can surprise you even on third or fourth listen (which inevitably will happen). Different tracks stick in your head each time through.

“I don’t know how to write conventional songs,” says Hospitality’s lead vocalist and guitarist Amber Papini. “I try to write with verse-chorus-bridge but it never works out that way.”

Don’t let the band’s unorthodox approach fool you. Hospitality isn’t new to the scene. Papini, drummer and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Michel, and bassist Brian Betancourt released an EP in 2009 featuring a few tunes that eventually made it to the upcoming record. That effort gained a bit of notoriety — Stereogum dubbed Hospitality a band to watch — but the members of the New York band were still focused in different directions. Betancourt and Michel were making music with others; Papini had a family death to tend to.

“We played sporadically but no one was clamoring to put a record out,” Betancourt says. “We were just kind of floating back then.”

Fans who were following Hospitality at the time will find that even familiar tracks take new directions this time around. The EP versions of “Betty Wang” and “Argonauts” could easily pass for lo-fi jazz recordings. But on the upcoming record, electric bass gives “Betty Wang” a stronger drive, while a series of descending chords at the beginning of “Argonauts” create a more uplifting sound.

“When we recorded the EP, we played acoustic and I used a drum set with my hands, this little rickety drum set,” Michel says. “It worked well for small venues, but as we hit bigger venues we had to go electric. So we wanted to represent the songs now as the way they developed.”

As the band awaits the record’s release, its members remain unsure what kind of response awaits them. “The only gauge we have now is Facebook,” Michel says. “To those 645 people, ‘Hello.'”

The hope is to continue building momentum and possibly swap day jobs. Currently, Betancourt works at a DVD label in Brooklyn, Michel freelances music for TV and film and Papini teaches second grade (she’s perhaps the hippest grade school teacher around, noting that sometimes the subject matter lurks into her writing).

“It’d be a dream to do music for a living; paying rent and our bills would be perfect,” Papini says. “That’s sort of the excitement, to see how the record goes and what can happen from there.”

Employment definitely fuels the bands’ message at times. “Betty Wang” (listen above) is about a female mentor Papini had while working at a bank. (“There weren’t that many women in leadership/managerial jobs there so I wanted to illustrate that,” Papini says. “All the dudes played golf but none of the women are never invited on those trips.”)

The song “The Right Profession” is about being bored to death in one career while dreaming of the perfect one. “I spent a lot of time trying to find one,” she says, “and music’s been the only one that stuck.”

After talking to the band and revisiting the song, it’s hard to not see “The Right Profession” as the perfect mantra for where Hospitality currently sits.

“It’s funny you mention mantra,” Betancourt says. “I always thought of it as the opening track because there’s a definite vibe, ‘This is what we’re about.'”